


Anatomy

by lagazzraladra



Category: A Separate Peace - John Knowles
Genre: Freeform, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-29
Updated: 2012-09-29
Packaged: 2017-11-15 06:00:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/523920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lagazzraladra/pseuds/lagazzraladra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>he's something like latin and french class at the same time</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anatomy

he's something like latin and french class at the same time, wrapped up in gold and honey and mythologies passed from tongue to tongue whispering of some greatness to be found in the stars

and he's got fingers tapered to the end like the whiskey bottles the boys from the Super Suicide Society sneak onto campus, the ones that you all pour down each others throats when you play cards

cards that turn into palms with hearts on them slayed wide like a smile after the reveal of a full hand which turn into thrumming skin and dark rooms where everything is impossibly noisier and louder and better than it should be while still be compressed and secret and almost nothing at all

but something is quiet and still about him now and this is never how he was with your hand open wide trying to take his heart out of his chest, so you run your hand down and tell him "here's the femur," because he was never good at anatomy and there's nothing else to say because the smell of hospital hangs heavy in the air and this somehow seems appropiate, "and here's the femoral artery, which becomes the adductor canal and leaves through the adductor hiatus and becomes the popliteal artery"

you move to the back of his knee fingers light, barely touching "the popliteal artery, it runs through the popliteal fossa to the muscle and then it becomes the anterior and posterior tibial arteries"

you're past the patella now, hand resting on his tibia and this is where your knowledge fails you (because somehow anatomy became a free period of outdoors and fresh new england air with the smell of cut grass or the beach and the silence of sand dunes heavy with the sound of breathing) so you drag your finger along his leg and press it into a pulse point "that's the fibular artery" you say but it's not enough, you don't know enough

and the things you don't know could fill a book and that book could maybe put him back together

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by this poem:
>
>> i tried to forget  
> but you grew like roots around my ribcage  
> and spouted flowers  
> just below my collarbones.  
> all day i pluck their petals  
> but i have not yet ascertained  
> whether you love me  
> or not  
> -unknown


End file.
